Fly Me To The Moon

Billy Crudup is a charismatic salesman selling homes on the Moon in Apple TV+’s retrofuturist comedy Hello Tomorrow!

IN POST-WAR AMERICA, THERE was an enthusiasm for predicting the exciting potential that our future might hold. From Tex Avery cartoons like “The House Of Tomorrow” to Disneyland ride Carousel of Progress and the New York World’s Fair, we were touted lives full of hovercars, fully automated houses and rocket trips to the Moon, just for fun. Sadly, that’s not our reality. But new Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! poses a world where it all came true.

Co-created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, Hello Tomorrow! gives us that shiny, brave new world where robots do our laundry, walk our dogs and deliver our milk, while dad uses his jet-pack to fly off to work.

But even with those wonders, humanity is still looking for something more. In this alternate reality, the ultimate aspirational goal is relocating to the Moon, and salesman Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) is the guy who is all about making dreams come true… for a price.

The first three episodes premiered on 17 February and laid out the nomadic life of Jack and his small team of salespeople, including Eddie (Hank Azaria), Shirley (Haneefah Wood) and Herb (Dewshane Williams), tootling from town to town in their hovercars, selling the big dream to ordinary people. With its gorgeous production design and practical, everyday robots assimilated into scenes, the series is a retrofuturism lover’s fantasy come to life. Jansen tells Red Alert that the series is the visual realisation of the notion that was once sold to humanity by popular culture, in huge part, by advertising.